1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a video player and, more particularly, to a video player for playing back video with audio-visual restrictions according to the audio-visual restrictions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally used as video recording media are a laser disc (LD), a digital versatile disc and a digital video disc (DVD: registered trademark). DVD has a parental lock function of placing audio-visual restrictions (hereinafter referred to as parental lock) on video which has a possibility of exerting adverse effects on growth and development of those under a certain age. With an age of a viewer registered in a DVD player, this function is inhibiting playback according to the contents of a parental lock. DVD also realizes multi-story which enables a plurality of stories to be determined, multi-angle which enables selection of a plurality of angles and dubbing in other language depending on a manner of storage of video data and voice data. DVD therefore enables small children to view the video in other story than original one while skipping violence scenes on which a parental lock is set.
Then, for such a parental lock, an age of a viewer is registered in a conventional DVD player.
As a conventional example of such a parental lock based on ages, there is a technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open (Kokai) No. Heisei 10-242874. This technique relates to switching of an output channel to a promotion channel or other channel without leaving the output channel as it is when a function related to parental lock (audio-visual restrictions) is activated at a digital broadcasting receiver.
Conventional DVD players, however, have a problem that a parental lock effective to a specific user is not effective to other user because of lack of taking into consideration the use of the same DVD player application by a plurality of users. Another problem is that since a parental lock for a user is fixed, the parental lock should be changed every time the user completes his birthday.